How to make a movie the secure way

At the RSA 2017 Conference this week, we’ll be presenting “Securing the Making of the Next Hollywood Blockbuster” (San Francisco | February 15, 2017 | 1:30 PM - 2:15 PM) with Academy Award®-winning studio New Regency. It’s a spellbinding adventure about their transition to secure movie production in the cloud, made possible by Microsoft Azure and a cadre of ISV partners who’ve ported their solutions to the platform.

New Regency, responsible for critically acclaimed feature films such as The Revenant and Birdman, and blockbuster titles including the recent Assassin’s Creed, knows what it’s like to be on the bleeding-edge of technology while at the same time telling vivid stories in full cinematic glory. They use technology to both help convey elements of the script to deliver on the producer’s vision, and to optimize workflows for efficiency and cost savings. In the middle of it all: securing the content that is the lifeblood of the business.

That content comes in many forms—memos, scripts, pictures, audio, email, contracts, videos, and more—all with an ever-growing association of metadata. It’s also stored in many places—on servers, workstations, mobile storage, archives, etc.—which presents a massive security challenge. Data flies far and wide, challenging all efforts to lock it down. On top of that, personal information such as health records, contract details, and paystubs have entered the mix, adding to an already strenuous data governance situation.

In this session, we’ll look at the end-to-end workflow designed by New Regency that leverages Azure and the combined wizardry of Avid, 5th Kind, Contract Logix, Docusign, MarkLogic, and SyncOnSet. Lulu Zezza, Physical Production Executive at New Regency and the driving force behind the project, noted that, “Moving to the cloud is the best way to implement security controls across so many different physical and logical environments, locations, and data types. We have people working all over the world, for different companies, using different systems, all contributing to the same production. In the past, it’s been like a free-for-all, with contractors getting access to things they shouldn’t, information being duplicated and stored in the wrong places, and sensitive content left out in the open.”

The new digital workflow enables a secure “script-to-screen” experience for the management of both production data and the crew’s personal HR information (to which new global privacy standards apply). Metadata captured from contracts, script, and camera is associated with filming days, scenes and takes recorded and later to the final edit of the film, reducing the need for document sharing and film screenings. Plus communications are kept protected and confidential. It’s a whole new way to make movies.

Join us at our session where you’ll hear about:

Architectural considerations for multi-domain cloud environments

Secure access and device management for BYOD users

Content protection and privacy in connected and disconnected networks

And glimpses behind-the-scenes of the making of The Revenant, Assassins Creed, A Cure for Wellness and Unfinished Business!